Soaring Hopes, Deepening Anxieties

Nations succumbed to nationalist and nativist urges at a time when the world needed global responses

- Shyam Saran

TECHNOLOGY DEFINED THE 2010-2019 decade and promises to drive the next into uncharted waters. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, machine learning and bionics graduated from science fiction to practical reality. Digital technologies ruled, and data became the new resource. Technology has emerged as the currency of power and is beginning to transform geopolitics. Confronted by an unfamiliar terrain and still prisoner to outdated templates, states succumbed to nationalist and nativist urges, creating political fractures precisely when the world in the making demanded responses that transcend national boundaries and compel collaboration. Digital technologies became pervasive, permeating social processes and human interaction. The world has become densely interconnected and information flows are instantaneous.

This reinforces democracy through easy access to information even as it enables state authority to deploy more refined instruments of authoritarian control. Liberal democracy was in retreat as political preferences swung in favour of the ‘strong and decisive leader’ who could rise above the hesitancies and ponderous nature of democratic processes. This was a decade marked by the rise of populist and authoritarian leaders, who were able to tap into the widespread resentment at growing wealth and income inequalities spawned by the application of new technologies that required new skills and capabilities. We have witnessed this in the unexpected election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. It is also evident in the support for Brexit in the UK. China has a powerful and authoritarian leader in Xi Jinping while Russia’s Vladimir Putin cultivates an image of a strong and decisive leader. The European Union, which represented a model of pooled sovereignty and regional integration, began to fragment, and has its own crop of populist leaders.